I often get asked: “Does my website need Search Engine Optimisation? I have a small company, isn’t that something for big companies with big budgets? To answer this question it is important to understand what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is.

So let’s take a step back and explain what happens when you do a search in Google, or any other search engine for that matter. Seeing that in 2014 Google owned 68% of the market share, it is fair to say that if you cater to their needs you are pretty safe that you will do well in other search engines too.

When you type a search in Google, you give the search engine an instruction to show you all the websites that are relevant to that search, in the order of importance. In other words, Google looks at the words you typed – called search terms – then looks at its own index of sites to see which sites relate to your search.

Clever spiders   

How does Google know which websites are related to your search? Search engines (like Google) have little programs called bots or spiders that crawl the internet looking for new websites or new content. These spiders have very complicated algorithms that are used to decipher your website. This tells them what your website is about and how it should be indexed. Indexing is simply adding your site to their directory under the relevant keywords.

This is why good content is so important. The search engine needs enough content, good keywords placed in the correct places along with all the “behind the scenes” rules in place to make sure your website not only shows up in a search but is also placed well in that search.

In the next post I will talk more about what happens behind the scenes.